Why your website isn't showing up on Google, and what I check first
Five things I check before anyone talks about rankings: does Google have the site at all, what each page says, the Business Profile, phone speed and the domain.
By Drew Palframan, Ucluelet · · 4 min read
Photo: Cox Bay lookout, Tofino, my own.
The short version
- First, check Google has your site at all: URL Inspection in Search Console is the real test.
- Every page should say, in words, what you do and the town you do it in.
- The map results come from your Google Business Profile, so make it match your site.
- Speed on a phone, and one address with the padlock, finish the groundwork.
Most of the “can you help with my SEO?” calls I get start the same way. There’s a website. The owner paid for it, or built it one evening on a page builder, and it looks fine. Type the business name into Google and there it is. Type what a customer would actually type, “plumber in Port Alberni” or “kayak rental Tofino”, and it’s nowhere.
Before anyone talks about rankings, I check five things, in this order. Most of the sites I’m shown fail one of the first three, and none of the fixes needs a marketing budget.
Most of the sites I’m shown fail one of the first three, and none of the fixes needs a marketing budget.
1. Does Google even have the site?
For a quick clue, search for site:yourdomain.com, with your own domain in place of that. If nothing at all comes back, Google probably hasn’t indexed the site, and nothing else on this list matters yet. It’s only a clue, though: Google says a page can be indexed and still not show up for that search. The real answer is in Google Search Console, which is free and takes about ten minutes to connect. Its URL Inspection tool tells you whether a page is indexed, and the Pages report shows which pages Google has and which ones it skipped. The usual reasons for a missing site: a “hide from search engines” switch left on from when the site was being built, a domain that was only connected a few days ago, or a site nothing links to that was never submitted anywhere. Every site I build gets connected to Search Console at launch.
2. Does each page say, in words, what you do and where?
Google reads text. A homepage titled “Home” that opens with “Welcome!” hasn’t told it anything. The page title, the main heading and the first paragraph should name the trade and the place: what you do, and the town or area you do it in. If you serve several towns and have something real to say about each one, give each its own page, rather than one page with twelve town names listed at the bottom. Google has learned to ignore pages that only exist to repeat a town name, and it does.
3. Does your Google Business Profile match your site?
For a local search, the map results at the top come from your Google Business Profile, not your website. If you haven’t claimed yours, claim it. Then check that the name, phone number and hours on it match your site, that the category is the one a customer would pick, and that the website link goes to the page about that service, not a homepage that mentions it in passing. Reviews belong here too. Ask for them, and reply to them.
4. Is it fast on a phone?
Most people searching for a business around here are on a phone, a lot of the time on a weak signal, on a dock or at a highway pull-out. A site that sits there loading loses them, and Google measures that wait. PageSpeed Insights is free, and anyone can paste a web address into it. A lot of page-builder sites load far more on every page than that page needs, and it shows up here. It’s one of the reasons I write the code by hand.
5. Does your domain go to one place?
Open your site with and without the www, and with http and https. All four should redirect to one secure address, with the padlock. If two of them show their own copies of the site, Google sees duplicate versions and gets mixed signals about which one is the real one, and anyone who lands on the plain http one is on an unencrypted page their browser marks “Not secure”.
What I don’t promise
Rankings. Nobody can promise those, and anyone who does is selling you something else. What I can tell you is that the five checks above are the groundwork, and every site I build ships with them done: real titles, a page per service, Search Console connected, fast on a phone, one address. The ongoing part, watching what people actually search for and adjusting the pages to match, is its own service, and I quote it separately: Local SEO.
If you’d like me to look at your site and tell you which of the five is the problem, book a call.